My poem “absolute zero” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle. This one has its origins in a journal entry from early 1989 which was forgotten and then rediscovered in October 2010 when I was working on the Iron Man Family Outtakes project. I can’t remember now in what state of completion this piece was when I found it, but I don’t think I had to do a whole lot of work to finish it.

I have extremely vivid memories of writing many of my poems: what was going on for me in that moment, the time, place, circumstances, etc. For others (like this one), I can’t recall much more than a general context and a time frame. Then there are those pieces, some of which are quite significant, for which I have no recollection whatsoever of the process of creation after some time has passed. Why I would remember writing some so well and others not at all has always been a mystery to me.

As I’ve been reading this one right now, it seems to me that it started with me feeling like I was too blocked to write anything (first two lines), which is kind of ironic in retrospect. I toss off a few lines in a journal, forget about them, and 22 years later I have a published poem. What a crazy, mysterious, unpredictable process this is.

* My video poem “secret children”.

* My video poem “falling though” with my accompanying written commentary about my fear of feeling and expressing grief and sadness.

* My poem “use everything” (video version is available here).

For a complete listing of all of my work on the Good Men Project site, you can visit my author page at http://goodmenproject.com/author/rick-belden.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work …

You can read the full article at:

http://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/healing-is-not-for-wimps

dark-eyed luxury
brilliant hourglass
plush warm lovely
forgotten dream.

forgotten dream
forgotten worlds
forgotten self
forgotten need.

she is jungle
she is ocean
she is starlight
she is music.

glorious illusion
forbidden treasure
holographic past
someone else’s present.

with her I want
with her I remember
but wanting is not having
and remembering is not being.

(PDF version)

Today’s poem on video, “falling through”, is from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

The subject of today’s poem is grief, or more to the point, my fear of feeling and expressing my grief. Actually, fear is much too mild a word for what I feel when I get close to my grief, sadness, and pain. A far more accurate word would be terror.

The source of this terror is not a mystery. I clearly remember the words I heard countless times as a child: Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. This was not an idle threat, as I had the great misfortune to discover many times when I was unable to “control myself” in time to avoid the consequences of my own tears. Crying only brought more pain. Tears only meant more tears. Any open expression of grief, sadness, and pain was a potential threat to my very existence, and over time I learned to hold those feelings tight, deep inside myself, to survive.

This conditioning against explicit expressions of grief and sadness didn’t end with home and family. It continued in school, with teachers and coaches, on the playground, and with friends. Like every other boy, I knew that crying was the worst sin I could commit in public. On those few occasions when I was unable to avoid doing it, the shame, the isolation, and the horror I felt were beyond words.

By the time I was into my teens, I pretty much had the crying thing well under control. It just didn’t happen anymore, not around others and not when I was alone either. But I still had one more defining experience ahead of me.

When I was almost 23, I was going through a very long and difficult breakup with my first girlfriend. We’d moved across the country together when I was 19, from New York to Texas, and lived together for several years, but now we were each living in our own places for the first time, and I was finding it very difficult.

One evening she came over to visit, and as we were talking, I began to cry. I’d never cried in front of her before, not even when she’d cheated on me, but this time I simply couldn’t help myself. I missed her, I was struggling with school and finances, and I was just so damn lonely. Her response was immediate: “If you don’t stop crying, I’m leaving.” The last thing I wanted in that moment was to be left all alone, so I buttoned right up. And I stayed buttoned up for years afterward.

Those were the lessons I learned about feeling and expressing grief and sadness. I learned that crying brings pain, punishment, violence, shame, rejection, isolation, and abandonment. I learned that crying only makes things worse. I learned to fear my own grief. I learned that tears can be like death.

Many years of hard personal work have shown me that allowing myself to feel and express my sadness and grief is a healthy and necessary part of being fully human. It is liberating. It’s completely natural. It’s cleansing. It brings peace and perspective. It is a source of great strength, an answer and an antidote to anger, and a door to forgiveness.

I’ve cried, wept, sobbed, moaned, and howled through tears many, many times, and it hasn’t killed me yet. To the contrary, I always feel much better, much freer, and much more present with myself afterward. And yet that deep conditioning I described still holds some sway over me. I’m still afraid to cry.

Sometimes that fear stops me and sometimes it doesn’t. As expressed in today’s poem, the key to accessing my grief and sadness, to moving it up and out, is always right here with me in my body. The challenge is to feel the energy below the surface and let it rise even as I am feeling my fear. Maybe someday my tears can come without having to struggle through all that fear. That is my hope.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

the car won’t start
the bottle is empty
the air is frozen
the house is silent
the windows are painted shut.

(PDF version)

it does not fear the lowest places
but rather
seeks them out
knowing that in the lowest places
water and sky are one again.

(PDF version)

watching myself lying helpless below
my own father’s fingers closing my throat
I guess I always
knew this would happen
I guess I knew it would
end up like this.

sixteen years old
my life leaking out
mom runs in and
saves the day.

sometimes I still feel his
hands on my neck
sometimes I still feel his
hate on my heart.

(PDF version)

a single thought

a newspaper rustles
a ball bounces
and I think of you
because that’s all I have now
well
have ever had of you
a thought on my brain
you gave me no more
so I left
and here I lay
with another man
in his bed

and it was only a few months ago
you were inside of me
and we talked about having babies

Trisha Freeman

Did you feel it? Bam! A little shot of reality, personal and true. Very tight, not a wasted word, and so real it hurts. This is the kind of poetry I like the best.

A couple of months ago, I was real sick for about a week with some sort of horrible cold/flu/whatever. After a few days, I began to realize that being sick as a dog, while not pleasant, was giving me a much-needed opportunity to slow down so I could remember and relearn how to be with myself again. And that aspect of being sick, once the realization kicked in for me, was sweet. A big part of that sweetness was remembering and re-experiencing what it was like to be with my body, moment to moment, without any agenda or any schedule. I’d had a similar experience in the last few months of 2009 when I was in the acute stages of dealing with my broken wrist and shoulder, but the nature of that experience was different. It was extreme. What I rediscovered while I was sick for a week was more of an everyday mode, the mundane “being with myself” that is needed for common experiences, like a bad cold. Or a bad day.

I’m having a lot of bad days lately, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a good way to deal with that issue. While driving to the pizza place recently one night after work (pizza and a brownie being my most favored self-medication and after-work sedative for the past few years), I was thinking about what else I could do to numb the painful after effects of these meaningless, seemingly endless, unrelentingly dreadful days at work. And I realized almost immediately that no amount of pizza or sex or TV or porn or drinking or drugs or overeating, nothing I’ve ever done in the past or could ever do in the future to try to numb myself and escape, would make that awful pain I feel at the end of every wasted day go away, because what I’m feeling is the pain of another lost day in my unlived life.

That was, and is, a sobering realization, one that has left me with a problem that is not easy to solve and a question that is not easy to answer:

How do I live with my pain?

I know I’m not alone in wrestling with this issue. I know that a lot of folks feel stuck in lives they didn’t see coming. They begin each day filled with dread and end each day filled with regret. They want to change their circumstances, but can’t, for all kinds of reasons. When I was younger, I used to tell others, “If you don’t like your life, change it.” I believed that, and I lived by it. I’m not saying I don’t believe it now, but I can also see now that life isn’t always so simple, or the path to change so direct. Sometimes life just piles up on people and boxes them in, sometimes as a result of their own choices, sometimes as a result of the system and the times in which they live, and sometimes as a result of chance, or fate, or karma, or whatever term you prefer for the mysterious and often apparently random hand of cosmic force in our lives.

I am where I am in my life as a result of all of the factors and influences listed above. I feel trapped in a losing game, and every instinct I have tells me to free myself and run for the life I want. But the way to freedom remains unclear, and the gap between my inner vision and my material reality is the distance between the life I want and the life I seem able to have. So I string my meaningless workdays together like a set of bad pearls and hope I can use them to buy myself some time somewhere down the road. Good strategy going forward, perhaps, but it does almost nothing in the now to diminish the pain of losing another day, and another, and another …

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” My experience tells me that this is true. I also know that embedded within every painful time and experience in my life has been the seed of great transformation and healing, not just of circumstances, but of self. And yet I resist. I want no more pain. I want to be done with it.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. I’ve written about this in the past (“falling through”). But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work, and if you don’t do your work when you’re called to do it, something bigger will come along and crack you wide open. None of us is immune to these processes.

I know, I can feel, that there is a lake of grief dammed up inside me now about the life I haven’t lived, and that I won’t be living tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. It frightens me, but I hope I can find a way to let it begin to move through me soon, because that’s the best way I know to be with, and live with, my pain.

“I’m aware of my songs. I’m aware of them because they’re about true emotions, true feelings, things that matter. And you don’t ever forget grief or joy, do you? They’re the constant companions of a human being. If you can coin them accurately enough, they will always be there.”

- John Lydon from A.V. Club interview, April 6, 2010

Beautifully expressed, and so very true.

disappointed farmers plow my heart
drive their tractors through my chest
plant corn in the ventricles
tomatoes in the aorta
wash the moss from the abandoned valves
+ wait for next year’s harvest.

sometimes they flood the chambers with smoke
so it doesn’t get too cold in there
sometimes deer come + eat the corn
sometimes the farmers go fishing
instead of tending the field
but the fish are angry
the earthworms are violent
the bridge is painful
the farmers return home filled with regret.

how have I come to such a place
drugs + fake lightning do not drain the well of shame
shame does not feed the corn
shame feeds the darkness
shame is food for the goners.

I should be crying now but I’m not
I should be grieving now but I’m not
I’m the quiet good boy
jumping for the dust mop
organized + clean
I’m the big mouth bad boy
lobbing sex grenades at the silky slinky thighs
deep in the mushrooms on a low budget
waiting for the end of the day
faithful to my creed . . .

I will not fall down again
I will not fall down.

I will not fall
I will not fail
I will not feel.

(PDF version)

I watched the empty branches
sway and wave at me
in the cold blue sky
clear blue and still
like the eyes I still love
eyes I remember
from this life and others
eyes I remember
and won’t see again.

(PDF version)

Rick’s work, if it is anything, is transformative. It holds out in optimism that by courageously facing the child we were, we can create a more rewarding future for the adult we want to become.

You can read his full post in its entirety at Men’s Well-Being.

In other “IMFO in the UK” news, another counselor based in the United Kingdom, John Kennett of Kent Counselling for Men, recently added Iron Man Family Outing to his Amazon UK Listmania list “Men, masculinity and maturity”, describing the book as a “raw and powerful means of accessing the inaccessible.”

In response to this recent UK news, a friend remarked to me via email, “I do think it is great that Iron Man is offered for sale in English pounds.” I have to agree.

I’ve posted some preview material on my web site at rickbelden.com/new_book, including an excerpt from the introduction and some of the poems that appear in the book.

I’m also making preview copies of the complete manuscript available to those who’d like an early look. Please see rickbelden.com/new_book for information about getting a preview copy.

In her comments about my book, Rebecca said:

What a treat to read such an authentic and heartfelt book. Through the use of poetry Belden tells his story of growing up with an abusive father. Belden allows the reader an insight into his heart and takes us along in his struggles to claim a conscious manhood. If you are looking for pretty poetry, this isn’t the book. This is raw, truthful, and captures both the darkness and the lightness of meeting one’s past. While Iron Man Family Outing may seem to be for men, it helped me as a woman have a better understanding of what men may be going through within themselves.

You can read her full post in its entirety at The Mindful Beat.

Rick Belden is a fellow Austinite who has written a book, Iron Man Family Outing, of healing poetry about his own personal journey of growing up male in American society. His poetry is moving and poignant. His descriptions of his family, himself and his relationships strike a chord with everyone with whom I’ve shared them. I highly recommend this book.

You can read her full post in its entirety at Kellevision and also at Kellen’s blog at Intent.com.

Kellen’s recent post “Making Yourself a Target: Replicating the Scapegoat Role in Your Life – How to Stop Doing It” is yet another insightful entry in her excellent ongoing series on the the role of the scapegoat in dysfunctional family systems. This is a subject that deserves far more attention than it gets, in my opinion. I’m grateful to Kellen for shedding some light on the experience and the dynamics of the scapegoat role, and for providing practical, helpful information for those who need it.

* Jason Fierstein of Phoenix Men’s Counseling praised the book’s “use of metaphor” and said the “poems are very transformational, and really give a voice to the modern male experience – one which is frequently (and unfortunately) not discussed.”

* Jack Kammer of The Center for Men and Boys in Social Policy commented on the isolation many men feel with their so-called “personal problems” and said the book “makes it unmistakably clear that any man who sometimes feels alienated from his best hopes and from his own, best, most cherished view of himself is most decidedly not alone.”

* Life/Executive Coach Sean Casey LeClaire said that “Belden explores the shadow side of the male journey” and added that the book “comes at a wonderful time, as millions of men find themselves without work … the opportunity to face themselves with courage and decency, which Rick’s poems do, is most timely.”

The complete archive of reviews for the book is available at http://rickbelden.com/reviews.